Going for Growth: Pilot Benchmarking in the Caribbean

Sustainable economic growth has reemerged as a subject of Caribbean policydiscussions, given the region's relatively lackluster performance in recent
decades. However, most policy discussions still focus on the region's fiscal and macroeconomic constraints instead of on the analysis of underlying productivity drivers. This is due in part to the persistence of fiscal and debt crises across the region since the 1980s, and inadequate data available to perform basic productivity analyses. This brief adapts a benchmarking framework originally developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to identify constraints to growth and help policymakers prioritize actions to address them. It summarizes the original technical background work and presents the results of initial exercises, using this framework, for The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.